Witness: 'It's over'

Timothy McVeigh has no last words but stares straight into camera before dying

Karen Abbott, News Staff Writer

Published June 12, 2001 at midnight

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TERRE HAUTE, Ind. -- Timothy McVeigh looked Oklahoma straight in the eye Monday morning and died.

Warden Harley Lappin pronounced America's deadliest domestic terrorist dead at 6:14 a.m. Colorado time, about five minutes after the first of three lethal drugs began flowing through yellow and gray tubes into a vein in McVeigh's right leg.

The 33-year-old decorated Gulf War veteran lay strapped to a gurney and tightly wrapped in a white sheet, staring directly at the video camera in the ceiling that showed his death to 232 bombing survivors in an Oklahoma City auditorium.

"Timothy McVeigh died with his eyes open," said CBS newsman Byron Pitts, one of 10 official media witnesses who watched McVeigh's last moments.

The man who killed 168 men, women and children when he ignited a 7,000-pound homemade bomb hidden in a rented truck outside Oklahoma City's Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building stayed silent when Lappin asked for his last words.

But he left them behind in his own careful handwriting: The 1875 poem Invictus, by William Ernest Henley, that celebrates the invincibility of the human spirit and concludes, "I am the master of my fate; I am the captain of my soul."

In Washington, D.C., President Bush declared that McVeigh had "met the fate he chose for himself six years ago."

Outside the federal penitentiary that houses the federal government's only death row, a misty red sun had risen an hour earlier over Indiana's green prairie. Light rain fell across the already dewy meadows as McVeigh was escorted to the execution chamber to become the first federal prisoner put to death since 1963.

It was a morning beautiful with bird song, and the half-moon McVeigh had been happy to see for the first time in years when he was moved to the death house hung like a broken pearl in the pale sky.

Death penalty protesters formed prayerful circles and sang We Shall Overcome in a field nearby, while supporters of capital punishment shouted "Die, McVeigh, die!"

Spectators lined up early on the road in front of the prison to stare at the media city of tents and trailers and portable buildings, abuzz with golf carts speeding journalists across the grass.

Lappin climbed the steps to the stage at 6:30 a.m. MDT to announce that McVeigh was dead.

"The court order to execute Timothy James McVeigh has been fulfilled," he said.

U.S. District Judge Richard Matsch in Denver had issued that order after a Colorado jury convicted McVeigh of bombing Oklahoma City's Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building on April 19, 1995. The same jury condemned McVeigh to die.

Paul Howell, 54, one of 10 victim and survivor witnesses chosen by lottery to travel to Terre Haute to see McVeigh die, said he searched the Oklahoma City bomber's face for any sign of remorse and found none.

"What I was looking for, and I'm sure most of us also, was that we could see some kind of, maybe, 'I'm sorry,' " Howell said.

"We didn't get anything from his face."

But Howell said he was relieved by the death of the man who killed his 27-year-old daughter, Karan Denise Shepherd.

"I'm feeling pretty good about it right now, because I know this man will never go in here and hurt us again in any form or fashion," Howell said. "It was just a big relief, just a big sigh come over my body, and felt real good."

Still, he said, McVeigh did not look like the embodiment of evil as he lay helplessly awaiting death with his feet in slip-on sneakers and a white T-shirt just visible above the sheet that covered him to the collarbone.

"He's not a monster -- I mean, not when you're looking him in the face," Howell said. "He's just a regular human being."

Victim and survivor witnesses embraced after McVeigh was dead.

"We were happy," said Anthony Scott, a civilian employee of the U.S. Army who was on the fourth floor of the Murrah Building when the bomb exploded.

"I think an individual is responsible for his own actions," Scott said. "I don't think this is meant as a deterrent. It's definitely a deterrent for Timothy McVeigh."

But Scott said he wished McVeigh could have seen him through the tinted glass of the room for bombing survivors and victims.

"I wanted him to see me, to somehow let him know that, 'You didn't break the spirit that you thought you were going to break.' "

The witnesses said McVeigh lifted his head from the gurney and strained to look each of them in the eyes, nodding in acknowledgment first to his lawyers in one room and then to each journalist in the second. He squinted hard at the tinted window that kept him from seeing the victim witnesses, but gave only a brief glance at the fourth room that held representatives of the government he despised.

McVeigh didn't smile at his lawyers, but his gaze seemed to reassure them, "It's OK, I'm OK," said media witness Diana Penner of Gannett News Service.

Rob Nigh, a McVeigh attorney who witnessed his client's death, spoke of McVeigh's insistence that his actions were justified.

"To the victims of Oklahoma City, I say that I am sorry, that I could not successfully help Tim to express words of reconciliation that he did not perceive to be dishonest," Nigh said.

Several media witnesses remarked on the absence of arrogance in McVeigh's eyes when he looked at them. Pitts said McVeigh appeared afraid but working to keep his glance steely. Radio reporter Susan Carlson of Chicago found the eye contact "chilling," but Shepard Smith of Fox News said it "felt like, 'Hello, thank you for being here.' "

Only Lappin and local U.S. Marshal Frank Anderson were in the death chamber with McVeigh.

"Inmate McVeigh was calm throughout the entire process," Lappin said.

About 90 minutes earlier, Bureau of Prisons spokesman Dan Dunne had announced that McVeigh slept on and off through his last night.

Lappin said McVeigh walked into the death chamber from the adjoining tiny cell where he had spent his last days watching television, meeting with his lawyers, telephoning his loved ones and writing letters.

"He stepped up onto a small step and sat down on the table," Lappin said. "He then positioned himself for us to apply the restraints.

"I anticipated this to be a very difficult thing to do, and it was," the warden said, "but I think today my thoughts and prayers are with the many victims of this tragedy in Oklahoma City."

Witnesses said McVeigh swallowed once or twice, took two large breaths that puffed his checks and exhaled through fluttering lips as the drugs rendered him unconscious, stopped his breathing and, finally, stopped his heart.

"Very slowly, his eyes stopped moving," said Rex Huppke of The Associated Press.

The blue eyes of the boy-next-door turned terrorist never closed.

His skin gradually yellowed, and Lappin, connected with an earpiece to a physician behind a wall who was watching a heart monitor attached to McVeigh's body, pronounced him dead.

"There was no sign of suffering, no sign of distress, no sign of fear," said media witness Crocker Stephenson of the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel.

Howell was thinking about his daughter. He was thinking about the rest of his family. He was thinking about other bombing victims he knew.

"I kind of did a prayer to them," he said, "and told them, 'It's over with.' "

Contact Karen Abbott at (303) 892-5188 or abbottk@RockyMountainNews.com.

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